The first step for preventing judges imposing their own viewpoints is that they realize that they have them. I'm going to be. Welcome back to Europa Felix.

I'm Felix Ronkus Ahebeke.

My guest in this episode is Law Professor and Advocate General at the Court of Justice Tamara Chappata.

Our main topic of conversation is legal realism, a topic on which she has written

several academic articles. It's tempting to misconstrue legal realism as a cynical,

anything-goes approach to the law. But in Chappata's writings and in this interview,

legal realism emerges as a form of judicial modesty.

She argues that the idea that legal questions have a single, correct answer is basically

a myth, and that courts would gain credibility if judges acknowledged more openly that their

legal decisions are choices instead of objective truths.

I ask her what is like to be Advocate General and if it has changed her perspective on judicial

decision-making. We talk about legal reasoning and objectivity. We discuss if artificial intelligence

can replace judges. We talk about transparency, about whether the Court of Justice should allow dissenting

opinions, and about imagining different realities in law and in science fiction.

Here is Tamara Chappata.

Tamara, welcome to the show.

Thank you for inviting me.

You are the first Croatian advocate general at the Court of Justice, and you also have a long academic career.

How big is the step from being an academic to being an advocate general?

I have to start with saying that before becoming an advocate general, I thought that this is just

going to be more or less the same. So I come to the court, okay, I will have to be writing

from within one particular case, but my job will be I have to read everything written about

...